The strangest thing about federal criminal justice today may be that companies are offered a clearer path to redemption than people are.

When a corporation commits a crime, the U.S. Justice Department increasingly offers something close to a path to redemption: Come forward early. Tell the whole story. Preserve the evidence. Identify the wrongdoers. Pay victims. Disgorge profits. Fix compliance failures. Do that, and a company may avoid indictment, reduce its penalty, avoid a monitor, and preserve its future.

This is the basic logic of DOJ’s new department-wide Corporate Enforcement and Voluntary Self-Disclosure Policy, announced in March. The policy creates a department-wide framework for companies that voluntarily disclose their misconduct, cooperate, remediate, disgorge gains, and compensate victims.  It allows qualifying companies to avoid prosecution, fines, and third-party oversight in some circumstances.

There are good reasons for this. Corporate crime is hard to detect from the outside. Companies hold the emails, payment trails, accounting records, compliance reports, and witnesses prosecutors need. If DOJ wants companies to come forward before investigators discover wrongdoing, it must offer more than a vague promise of “credit.” It must offer a reasonably predictable path.

In this respect, whatever one thinks of DOJ’s broader direction, here it has done something sensible: It has built a roadmap.

The question is why that kind of clarity and imagination is easier to find when the defendant is a corporation.

Individual criminal cases are not devoid of mercy. Federal prosecutors have charging policies. The Sentencing Guidelines account for acceptance of responsibility. Cooperation can matter enormously. Restitution, remorse, family obligations, health, and rehabilitation can all affect how a case is resolved.

But mercy for people usually works differently. It is more discretionary, more opaque, and more often retrospective. A defendant may receive credit for accepting responsibility, but usually after charges have been filed. Cooperation can help, but often only if the government decides the cooperation is useful. Rehabilitation may move a judge at sentencing, but by then the indictment, legal fees, employment consequences, and family disruption may already have altered the defendant’s life.

That is the asymmetry: Corporate rehabilitation can prevent prosecution; human rehabilitation more often mitigates punishment.

Arthur Andersen helped teach DOJ this lesson for companies. The accounting firm was indicted after the Enron scandal, convicted of obstruction of justice, and effectively destroyed. By the time the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reversed the conviction, the firm could not be put back together. The conviction was gone, but the institution was dead.

That experience left a mark. Prosecutors learned that charging a corporation can punish many people who did not commit the crime: employees, partners, shareholders, pensioners, customers, and communities. A corporate indictment can function as a death sentence even before trial.

The Morgan Stanley FCPA matter shows the other side of the same lesson. In 2012, DOJ charged a former Morgan Stanley managing director, Garth Peterson, for evading internal controls in connection with a real estate deal in China. But DOJ declined to charge Morgan Stanley itself, emphasizing the company’s internal controls, compliance program, and efforts to prevent misconduct. In other words, the individual was prosecuted, but the institution was spared because DOJ concluded that the company had built systems intended to prevent the crime.

That is precisely the kind of judgment corporate enforcement now encourages. DOJ can ask whether the institution failed, whether it responded responsibly, whether prosecution would repair harm or merely spread it, and whether accountability can be achieved without destroying the enterprise.

But prosecutions of individuals can also impose life-altering consequences long before sentencing. They can end careers, rupture families, trigger deportation, destroy reputations, and bankrupt households. And when the system later reverses course, the damage cannot always be repaired.

Ray Donovan, President Reagan’s labor secretary, resigned after becoming the first sitting cabinet member to be indicted. He was later acquitted. Afterward, he famously asked, “Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?” The question endures because it captures something every defense lawyer understands: An acquittal may end a case, but it does not necessarily restore a life.

Ted Stevens offers an even sharper example. He was convicted on federal corruption charges shortly before Election Day in 2008 and lost his U.S. Senate seat. Months later, DOJ moved to dismiss the indictment because of prosecutorial misconduct, and the conviction was set aside. But the election could not be rerun. His career could not be restored. The legal system corrected itself too late to undo the real-world consequences of the prosecution.

That is the individual analogue to Arthur Andersen. The point is not that corporations and people are the same. They are not. The point is that criminal process itself can be destructive. DOJ recognizes that reality when the defendant is a corporation. It should recognize it more clearly when the defendant is a person.

DOJ’s corporate policy does not say misconduct is irrelevant. It says the defendant’s response to misconduct matters. DOJ’s corporate policy rests on a humane premise: The government should care not only about what went wrong, but also about what has been repaired, who else will be hurt, and whether prosecution will destroy more than it fixes.

Those principles should not disappear when the defendant is a human being.

Of course, companies and people are different. A corporation can replace managers, redesign controls, and change reporting lines. A person cannot become a new legal entity. But people can change too. They can get treatment, repair harm, work, care for children, assist victims, leave criminal networks, and become less dangerous. The criminal justice system says it believes in rehabilitation. DOJ’s corporate policy shows what it looks like when that belief is translated into rules.

The answer is not to make corporate criminal justice harsher for the sake of symmetry. That would be the wrong lesson. The better lesson is that DOJ has demonstrated an institutional capacity it should use more broadly. It knows how to create incentives before prosecution, define cooperation, value remediation, weigh collateral harm, and preserve accountability while avoiding unnecessary destruction.

The Justice Department has built a largely thoughtful criminal justice system for corporations. It is transparent, structured, pragmatic, and alert to the possibility that prosecution itself can do harm.

The challenge is not to ask why companies get that kind of system. It is to ask why people so often do not.

Duncan Levin is a former federal prosecutor, criminal defense attorney, and lecturer at Harvard and Columbia law schools.